Raghu Yarlagadda

Cerebras is bringing its AI supercomputers to the UAE’s Stargate project ◾ Deploying megawatt-scale AI infrastructure across the Gulf, India & Pakistan ◾ Partnering with Abu Dhabi’s G42 ... part of the U.S.-UAE Stargate deal ◾ Competing head-on with Nvidia in AI compute ◾ Planning 12–15 data centers within 8 months ◾ IPO refiling “soon,” says CEO Andrew Feldman The UAE is quietly building the world’s largest AI hub outside the U.S.

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"Build the event you wish existed" That's what we at Monadical did last week at #NYTW. We wanted an AI Engineers discussion for Engineers. There's always a lot of events out there for VCs to network, or for startups to learn about G2M, but very little on lessons learned from actual engineers in the field. So that's the event we hosted. Big thank yous to our awesome panel, Roy Pereira, Ben Cohen and Corey J. Gallon. Here's the key takeaways and the AI tools we're using. 🚀 All three panelists independently called AI Agents the most transformative LLM application they’ve used. They specifically called out Claude 3.5 Sonnet for its accuracy and reliability. 🪨 We dug into how LLMs are “jagged”, not general. They can be shockingly good at some tasks and completely fail at others. Everyone agreed: good evaluations are critical (and hard.) 🧪 Corey noted how public benchmarks and reality are two different things. Most public evals are saturated or gamed. ♊ Ben emphasized that AI projects are actually two projects: building the tool and building the evaluation process. 🧱 We explored how falling dev costs may impact startup defensibility and labor demand. Roy shared that founders are already shifting strategies in response. ⚒️ In a world of daily AI launches, the panel discussed how they decide what’s worth attention, and what’s just noise. They called out tools like Goose, Aider, Claude Code, and Monadical’s own Cubbi, which helps run agentic workflows safely in dev environments. (links in the comments). CTA: What would you want to hear in an AI Applied Engineering talk you attended?

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Emergent just raised $70M from SoftBank + Khosla — less than four months after its last round — and is now at $50M ARR, 5M users, and live in 190+ countries… What’s most interesting to me isn’t just the speed or the valuation pop. It’s who is using it. Non-technical founders. Small business owners. Even seniors. All “vibe-coding” real products into existence without engineering teams. This is what it looks like when AI raises the floor AND lowers the ceiling. Proud that VSC gets to help take this story to the mainstream. 🚀

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Berkeley has long been a hub where deep physics intersects with real-world ambition, and photonics is exemplifying this in real time. Future Frontier Capital and the Berkeley Gateway Accelerator are co-hosting an evening focused on the future of light-based computing with Opticore. This event will bring together founders who are building the chips and researchers from the labs that trained them, creating a global ecosystem that connects North America to Europe's photonic infrastructure. Panelists include: - Ryan Hamerly, CTO of Opticore (Ph.D., Stanford; photonic chips at 100x GPU efficiency) - Daniel Klawson, CEO of TopoLight (Ph.D., UC Berkeley Integrated Photonics Lab; quantum computing photonics) - Jorn Smeets Managing Director NA of PhotonDelta (scaling the global photonic chip ecosystem) - Moderated by Kai Schuster Schuster of Opticore (materials scientist, photonics founder) The format features a concise panel discussion followed by a Q&A, with ample networking time to explore the topics that matter to you. If you are involved in hardware, tracking deep tech, or looking to understand the implications of photonics for AI infrastructure and quantum systems, this event is worth your evening. Thursday, May 7 | Doors at 5:30 PM | Berkeley Gateway Accelerator Link to register in the comments section.

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Design is where the real value in electronics gets created, it’s where IP is built, roadmaps are defined, and margins are won. In a $3.5T global electronics market, owning design is the next frontier. India has made huge strides in scaling electronics output now ~$120B, but design-led manufacturing remains a gap. That’s the opportunity iDO Devices is going after. They're building full-stack capabilities, from firmware and hardware design to system integration — to enable world-class consumer tech to be designed and developed from India. Thrilled to back this vision at Merak Ventures alongside Blume Ventures. #Electronics #ODM

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San Diego-based Manifold (AI Detection and Response platform) has raised $8 million in seed funding; lead backer Costanoa Ventures, along with several institutional investors including Cherry Ventures, Rain Capital, Modern Technical Fund, and angel investors.

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🚀 Powering India's Tech Product Innovation: iDO Devices Private Limited Raises $4M (~₹34Cr) iDO Devices (Fund V) has raised $4M in funding co-led by us at Blume Ventures and Merak Ventures. Founded by Shalabh Srivastava (CEO) and Ashita Gupta (Chief Business Officer), iDO Devices is building India's first full-stack technology product ODM (Original Design Manufacturer). The company develops end-to-end hardware and software solutions for connected devices, specializing in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Wi-Fi technologies. The fresh capital will accelerate customer acquisition, boost technology and IP development, and expand their geographical presence. With a team of over 100 engineers across India and China, iDO Devices is advancing its 'Single-Window Fulfillment Vision' to develop a comprehensive technology value chain in India. "What we are trying to create at iDO is a set of capabilities ranging from chipset design through hardware layout, firmware, and systems software, which, along with investment and control of critical component technologies, will position iDO as a Global leader in tech product design across technology segments," says Shalabh Srivastava, Founder and CEO. Arpit Agarwal, Partner at Blume remarks, "India has the engineering depth to become a global leader in product design and fulfillment. iDO Devices' integrated approach positions the country as a preferred destination for technology solutions." As the global product design and fulfillment market approaches $15 billion by 2025, iDO Devices is leading the charge in positioning India as a global hub for technology product design and manufacturing. Read the full announcement here: https://lnkd.in/dHgzdPKu Karthik B. Reddy, Ashish Fafadia, Sanjay Nath, Arpit Agarwal, Sajith Pai, Rohit Kaul, Ria Shroff Desai, Mitul Mehta, Alok Mehta, Deepika Jain, Sarita Raichura, Gautham Sivaramakrishnan, Vikram Gawande, Elton C.

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India just committed $1.1B to a state-backed AI venture fund. Blackstone took a majority stake in an AI compute startup for $600M. Every major AI CEO is in Delhi this week. Everyone's racing to own AI infrastructure. But most are buying the wrong layer. GPUs and compute are first-order infrastructure. Necessary, but commoditizing fast. The second-order infrastructure — the layer that controls how AI actually touches customers, enforces compliance, and compounds data — that's where durable value lives. Compute is the highway. We're building the toll booths. While $2B+ flows into GPU farms this week, the real moat is being built quietly: AI systems that own the customer engagement layer for entire industries. Which layer of AI infrastructure are you betting on? #SecondOrderThinking https://lnkd.in/esPXVG8P

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📡 Nyobolt has officially secured UNICORN status following a fresh capital injection. 🇬🇧 Co-founder and CEO Sai Shivareddy is steering the Cambridge-based firm through a remarkable period of growth. Nyobolt develops ultrafast charging and energy storage hardware specifically for autonomous machines and AI data centres. Their technology delivers up to 20x more power than standard alternatives, cutting downtime for heavy-duty applications to near zero. The market for physical AI is expanding rapidly, yet traditional batteries often struggle with the 24/7 intensity required by modern robotics. 🚀 £44m Series C led by Nasdaq-listed Symbotic with participation from Bill Boyd 🚀 $1bn valuation reached just months after warning of a potential cash crunch 🚀 Revenue grew five-fold over the last twelve months 🚀 Supported by IQ Capital, Latitude (Phoenix Court), Scania Invest, and CBMM The company is now expanding into India with plans for over 100MW of off-grid data centre infrastructure in Rajasthan. Amazing news for the whole team. Sai Shivareddy 👏 is building the power infrastructure for the next generation of robotics. -- 👀 Follow aulium for more insights and interviews on Innovation & Private Capital #innovation #privatecapital #venturecapital #tech

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Sustained ~252–291 GiB/s of HBM memory throughput on H100s under decode load — essentially hitting the hardware roofline. This matters because HBM throughput, not FLOPs, is the real bottleneck in LLM inference. By keeping memory nearly fully saturated, I’ve unlocked far higher efficiency and throughput than standard engines. The result: 0.9–1.36M tokens/sec with ~0.1 ms first-token latency  #AI #LLM #GPURouter #H100 #Inference #CostEfficiency #Innovation #DeepLearning #AIInfrastructure #HighPerformanceComputing NVIDIA AMD OpenAI Google Shilpa Kolhatkar Keith Strier a16z speedrun

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Y Combinator's strong ecosystem continues to thrive as Kulveer Taggar, a seasoned alum, announces a dedicated $34M fund for YC startups through Phosphor Capital. This move highlights the potential of investing in familiar ground, where past experiences can translate into future successes. At ElevenX Capital, we recognize the value of understanding founder journeys in leveraging investment strategies. How can we better support emerging funds targeting proven networks? #investing #innovation #venturecapital #entrepreneurship

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Seligman Ventures Leads Cognichip’s $60M Series A to Back Physics-Informed AI for Chip Design, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and Seligman Ventures’ Umesh Padval Join the Board https://lnkd.in/ggv3FbP6

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At nvp capital we believe the future of vertical businesses includes physical AI, the robots and hardware that will automate previously untouchable processes across under-digitized industries. Training physical models on high-quality real-world data is a core driver of that thesis. That's why we're energized to invest in Human Archive (YC W26). Human Archive is building the training data layer for physical AI, capturing humans doing everyday work across the industries where robots will operate next. Raj Patel Shloke Patel Rushil Agarwal and Samay Maini have a unique view of where this is market is going and we're glad to be partnering with them and teaming up with Zachary DeWitt at Wing Venture Capital We wrote about our conviction in physical AI earlier this year (check out the blog link in the comments) and Human Archive is exactly the kind of investment that thesis was pointing toward. https://lnkd.in/eXsa6zRG

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Gene Rapoport and I are excited to announce the launch of our new podcast, The Practical Frontier, a video interview series on Substack where we engage with AI founders who are building tomorrow's technology driving real results today. In our first episode, we had the pleasure of speaking with Tanay Kothari, CEO of Wispr (Wispr Flow). Here are three key takeaways from our conversation: 1. Voice is the on-ramp to AI. Users provide the model with significantly more context when speaking compared to typing, leading to improved output quality. 2. A "system of you" is emerging. This new layer interacts with the user, moves across applications, accumulates context, and becomes smarter with increased engagement. 3. Hardware is regaining importance. As voice becomes a primary input method, the traditional screen-and-keyboard setup is no longer the only relevant form factor. Be sure to stay tuned for the demo at the end of the episode. Please sign up and share - we also welcome feedback as we build this podcast. https://lnkd.in/gshhS-8A

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If hardware is going to compress from multi-year cycles to adaptive, intelligence-driven programs, it won’t just require builders. It will require platform thinkers. Excited to welcome George Thangadurai to Wizerr’s Advisory Board. George is a Growth-Stage Partner at Avataar Venture Partners and one of our earliest backers. With 30+ years across enterprise software, AI/ML, cloud, and IoT, including leadership at Intel Corporation, Intel Capital and multiple IPO and M&A journeys, he understands what it takes to scale global infrastructure. At Wizerr AI, we are building the AI-native inference infrastructure for hardware systems, where engineering, sourcing, and supply decisions converge at the program level. “As an investor, I look for platform-scale opportunities with durable moats. Wizerr has the ingredients to build the intelligence backbone for hardware programs globally.” Grateful to build this with leaders who see where hardware is heading.

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Zeal Capital Partners is backing overlooked founders building solutions in fintech, health equity, and the future of work and learning – not because it sounds good, but because it’s where real innovation is happening. Nasir Qadree is flipping the script on who gets funded and what’s considered investable. 🎧 Tune in for this episode as he shares how Zeal is redefining where capital flows – and why betting on overlooked people and places isn’t just possible, it’s profitable: 👉https://lnkd.in/eR37V2MR #SRI360 #ImpactInvesting #SustainableInvesting #Sustainability #InclusiveInvesting #VentureCapital #StartupFunding #ZealCapitalPartners #NasirQadree

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Hear from a well known name in semiconductor Industry - where the puck may going as India’s deep tech story evolves!!

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What a joy to speak with this brilliant cohort of innovators in the The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) ENTICE (Energy Transitions Innovation Challenge) 2.0 program and taking on their sharp questions at the investor bootcamp. 80% of global GHG emission reduction goals for 2050 can be met through energy system decarbonization, efficiency and electrification. This represents a US $100 trillion opportunity according to the IEA.     A stronger, more stable grid is at the heart of building a #resilient #energy future. This year’s program challenges innovators to tackle:  1) Behind-the-meter digital twins: #AI tools to analyse consumption and create appliance-level insights  2) Industrial flexibility at scale: AI solutions using smart meter data to identify flexible assets and operational inefficiencies    Kudos to the entrepreneurs and the GEAPP team for curating and executing such a thoughtful program.     Looking forward to seeing how these #innovations scale #impact.  Synapses Dalberg Media Vaishali (Vish) Mishra Anukul Tripathi (He/Him) Jayant Sinha Saurabh Kumar

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